The New Yorker Discovers Twitter, Scoffs

The New Yorker's Steve Coll and George Packer--two of
the English-speaking world's premiere journalists--are awfully
preoccupied with Twitter this week. Packer, a hardened foreign
correspondent, took to his blog, of all places, to denounce Twitter:

The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every
time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending
and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people
every few minutes is an image from information hell. I’m told that
Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But
that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at
all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with
the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter
sounds less like sipping than drowning.

I haven’t used crack, either, but—as a Bilton reader pointed out—you
don’t need to do the drug to understand the effects. One is the sight
of adults walking into traffic with their eyes glued to their iPhones,
or dividing their attention about evenly between their lunch partner
and their BlackBerry. [...]

There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting,
tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will
come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time,
attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the
immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s
spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with
breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven
centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the
trade-offs that come with this revolution.

A technological system is as indifferent to the character of its
user as dice are to the character of the craps player. And yet the
qualities of excellence in a great book do seem specific to the book’s
form, and what it requires of its human partner. The book’s
disappearance might well herald the diminishment of those qualities in
culture.

The qualities of excellence in a great tweet—let’s stipulate that
these might include spontaneous humor and the real-time witnessing of
crimes against humanity—are also particular to its form. It may be that
the generation growing up with Twitter will come to feel that the
distinctive qualities the technology requires—such as living without
privacy in an electronic hive, bee-like—is natural and desirable. For
the rest of us, like all forms of evolution, it will require
adaptation. Resistance is part of adaptation.

All told, the two have so far dedicated 2,710 words to the topic, about
the equivalent of one full-length New Yorker feature. If Packer and
Coll are worried about Twitter distracting from long-form print
journalism, they seem to be proving their own thesis.